Ethical Dilemmas And Coping Of College Counselors In Crisis Intervention

Significance of the studyCollege students’ psychological crises have the feature of sudden, high-threatening, devastating and dissemination so that college counselor who has this major job generally felt great psychological stress. They must not only master the crisis intervention professional knowledge and skills, but also have the ability to make a decisive and swift judgment, handle and coordinate the various relationships in campus. Meanwhile, the college counselors may also shoulder the responsibility of teachers, administrators or other roles, which easily lead to ethical dilemmas of multiple relationships with school employees, confidentiality, informed consent and some ethical principles cannot really be implemented.Thus, in-depth study which is focusing on ethical conflicts and dilemmas faced by counselors in actual practice become a general need of practitioners. Previous domestic empirical researches mainly focuses on ethical counselors’ ethical awareness and behavior investigations, evaluation of profession ethics education, while research on ethical issues in substantive work specifically targeted on college counselors is few. Under severe college psychological crisis situation, the study aims to understand the college counselors’ dilemmas in dealing with students’ psychological crisis intervention and the way coping these dilemmas, as well as factors which affect the decision-making process. This study will provide suggestion and thinking to other universities psychological workers, meanwhile, draw counselors’ trainer or being trained counselor attention to specific standards and guidelines for consideration of solving the ethical dilemma.Objectives and Methods of the studyThe purposive sampling has been used in this study, counselors who provide counseling services for their college students (including full-time and part-time). Respondents have following characteristics:has psychological consultation experience1year and above, and in the past year have been involved in crisis intervention; access to national counselors or registered counselors qualification, or psychiatrist qualification. According to the purpose of this study, researchers contacted by telephone or e-mail initiative to invite the respondents interviewed. After informed consent, considering the needs of the respondents, interview will be arranged. Sampling has been stopped when15people have been interviewed and information is saturated.In this study, face-to-face interview is the main method for data collection, combined with participatory observation and non-intrusive data collection for data supplement. Semi-structured interview outline has been used for interviews, the grounded theory method of has been used for analyzing of the collected data.Results of the studyAccording to the experience of the respondents in this study, counselors in colleges and universities apply professional ethics in working area is more difficult. Ethical dilemmas raised during Crisis Intervention include:counselors’professional competence, confidentiality and reporting issues, informed consent, the role conflicts, and the welfare of the students, referral and tracking. 1. Challenges on counselor professional competency:being lack of ability of assessment on the effect of psychological crisis event on client, strong emotional reactions and counter-transference exist in the process of crisis intervention, supervision and professional support is few.2. Difficult issues in terms of confidentiality and reporting:For the uncertain crisis situation, whether to break confidentiality? How to control the degree of secrecy? When the executives inquire about the clients’ information, how to secrecy? When people were in special (such as violence, pregnancy, etc.) situation, should secrecy or not? When other crisis intervention worker cannot keep relative information secret, how to do? If college has no capacity to deal with the crisis, whether counselors break the confidentiality of students’ information?3. Informed consent:college counselors have different attitudes about the informed consent of the exception of confidentiality and feel hard to deal with the affairs when informed consent rejected by clients.4. For role issues, college counselor affected by a cast of unreasonable expectations in university environment surrounding and differences of understanding their role, thus a conflict within the role of counselor and a conflict as between different roles.5. For fully ensuring the well-being of client, college counselors felt difficult. Counselors sometimes have to deal with the crisis in fatigue states, too busy that assign some their work to other unqualified persons, etc.. In addition, counselors encountered cheating in the process of crisis intervention, counselors hold different opinions with their leader and the leader’s opinion has the higher priority, or crisis intervened by the administration and counselors have to take responsibility over their capabilities. 6. College counselors aren’t able to realize referral of cases because of their parents’ attitude or no suitable referral resource. College counselors have not been in the process of checking when client back to school, and thus the counselor felt hard to take to tracking the clients.In the crisis intervention of College Counselors, dilemma of counselors reflected the following characteristics:(1) For professional ethics, counselor partly unaware or uncertain.(2) Counselors have different understanding, behavior with others.(3) Counselors felt difficult to request other staff to comply with professional ethics, it is difficult to change other people unethical norms.(4) Counselors do not know how to balance the different role expectations and the needs of different clients.(5) When fail to fully comply with professional ethics, they feel uneasy.Response to the aforementioned ethical dilemmas, college counselors adopted a balancing strategy to meet requirement of crisis parties, counselors, schools, parents. For different situations, according to counselors’experience, individualized approach has been used.Conclusions of the study1. College counselors in psychological crisis intervention process in the face of major ethical issues related to professional competence counselors, issues of confidentiality, informed consent, the role issues, how to ensure the well-being of students, referral and tracking.2. College counselors adopt a balancing strategy consultant primarily to meet the multiple needs. Based on their own experience, difficulties in different situations have been dealt with different coping styles.3. The factors leading to above ethical dilemmas include flawed academic education which, college counselors lack of ethical awareness, showing passive ethical awareness. Because college counseling agencies have their institutional characteristics, counselors’ role has been greater impacted. Meanwhile, in the university environment, psychological crisis interventions need to consider their specific situation.4. counselors deal with ethical dilemmas in the process, it is desirable to ensure maximum benefits on the basis of the parties, considering the interests of the school, good relations with others, counselor roles responsibilities and other factors, the main professional ethics and adopt a balanced Administrative Ethics strategies for processing. However, in the specific process of consideration, lower status of professional ethics, administrative ethics and work ethic are considering college counselor placed a higher priority on the position, showing the insistence of their own lack of professional ethics.Features and creativities of the study1. This study is a qualitative research on ethical dilemmas and coping styles of college counselors’work in psychological crisis intervention.2. This research provides more in-depth, rich and dynamic information for the college counselors specific work situation, to make up the weakness of previous quantitative research which can only provide overall situation of counselors’ethical behavior or awareness.The limitations of the study and the predication of further studies1. The concept of psychological crisis intervention in this study is a relative broad one, thus involving ethical dilemmas include treatment for various types of mental illness, self-injurious behavior, self-injury treatment, post-traumatic stress disorder treatment response and so on. Greater emphasis on the amount of information provided holistic, in-depth to a limited extent. Further research can subdivided these situations in the future, for example, is divided into suicide, self-injury, medication for the treatment of mental illness in the college students and other ethical topics.2. In the process of data collection and analyzing, results might be limited to researcher’s "student" role, interview skills as well as the inexperienced practice of psychological crisis intervention. Although attempts to understand the situation and difficulties of respondents, but my ability and life experience might affect results of the study.